this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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[–] Justdaveisfine@midwest.social 21 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I suspect we will see a human brain to digital interface. I don't think it will be "downloading minds" or anything, but I could see someone finding a way to plug a specialized camera or mic in to have a full functioning robotic replacement part.

I'm pretty sure they already have the beginning pieces to this, but its too specialized and expensive to do anything commercial with it yet.

[–] pleasestopasking@reddthat.com 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This is so terrifying to me. I feel like it'll end up like the Black Mirror episode with the subscription model, getting more and more expensive with fewer features.

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[–] naught101@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Cochlear implants are a form of this, and are already commercial. I remember having a conversation with a guy at a doof about 10 years ago, standing right near a loud sound system, and it took me 20 minutes to realise he had one. He was completely deaf without it on.. I can only assume the tech is much better these days.

Similar things exist for vision (though maybe not yet commercial?).

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[–] whotookkarl@lemmy.world 18 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Tricorders, cellphones are already partway there they just need more durable, small sensors like a handheld light spectrometer to tell what things are made of and a handheld interferometer to detect gravity

[–] invertedspear@lemmy.zip 13 points 1 week ago

Check out the app Phyphox, it uses all your existing sensors and probably surpasses tricorders in several ways while, of course, lacking in a few others.

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[–] ThisIsAManWhoKnowsHowToGling@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Fast-refresh ePaper. I just want a laptop I can use outside, man!

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[–] reddig33@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago

Computer circuits based on light instead of electricity.

[–] acockworkorange@mander.xyz 9 points 1 week ago

We currently carry tricorders in our pockets. I can see a medical tricorder being ubiquitous for field medics, ships, and the like within 100 years.

[–] Toes@ani.social 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Railguns, there already exist prototypes that destroy themselves. So close!

[–] surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I thought we already had rail guns on ships?

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[–] cronenthal@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Nuclear fusion seems increasingly achievable.

[–] cynar@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

They are down to 2 main problems now. The main one is (the cost of) scaling up. Fusion reactors will be more effective then bigger they are. The tiny test ones are already past break even.

The other is wall material. Apparently the radiation has an annoying ability to transmute the elements making up the wall of the reactor. They are working out a material that can maintain its bulk mechanical properties, even with random elements appearing in its internal structure.

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[–] TribblesBestFriend@startrek.website 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Cancer curing nanotechnology

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[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 7 points 1 week ago

Is it cheating to say AI and humanoid robots?

Anti-aging tech, if so.

[–] dil@lemmy.zip 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Ai and eeg can read brain waves generate images already kinda decent, maybe meet the robinsons memory viewer machine.

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[–] the_q@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I think we can make an oven with a tiny fire breathing dinosaur in it.

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[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Direct brain interfaces for, like, VR. So instead of a screen strapped to your face, your visual cortex is just stimulated so you see the game using your own "hardware." A literal Matrix type environment for your mind.

This is either gonna be cool and fun, or scary and evil. But it will exist.

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[–] Tolookah@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Portable communicators. It would be slick to have a USB c tricorder though.

[–] qantravon@startrek.website 12 points 1 week ago

...you mean phones?

[–] Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

Hold up. I'm pretty sure things that already exist don't count.

[–] invertedspear@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Download the Phyphox app to access your phones raw sensor data. Very much like a tricorder.

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[–] Mediocre_Bard@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago (8 children)

Suicide Machines on Street Corners.

[–] barneypiccolo@lemm.ee 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

They already have them that you can carry in your pocket.

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[–] Dagwood222@lemm.ee 4 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Asteroid mining. We've had the tech to get people to the asterodi for decades, just lack the will to do it.

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[–] jordanlund@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago (18 children)
[–] troyunrau@lemmy.ca 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Not FTL though. Slower than light, causality preserving version? Sure.

[–] Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)
[–] troyunrau@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Exceeding FTL (and breaking causality) is basically a sci fi trope at this point with about as much credibility as psychics. To have at least some credibility you need one of: a testable hypothesis, or an unexplained phenomenon. Right now we have neither. At best, we have some equations, that work below light speed, where we can extrapolate past light speed and see how the math works. The problem is: none of these equations are testable as they all contain infinities or other asymptotic features that prevent passing light speed itself. So, if there's no viable math to get from sublight to FTL, and there's no unexplained phenomena, then what we're left with is nothing.

Even quantum entanglement, which is a darling of sci fi whenever they need a plot device (hello Le Guin and the ansible), has categorically been shown to obey causality and the light speed limit in every lab test.

At some point it's like asking for negative mass, antigravity, or other things that the math would allow. Except our universe doesn't.

I've got a wormhole to sell you ;)

[–] Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 week ago

Obviously if we were to exceed light speed we would turn into lizards and mate with each other and have lizard babies. I thought this was common knowledge.

[–] Ledericas@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

in scifi there seems to be several types of ftl: one is typical warp like drive of trek, and star wars, and hyperdrives which is similar to transwarp/slipstream/xindi vortex travel, which is interdimensional travel so not technically violating light speed. and the least common one is interdimensional teleportation, BSG reimanging uses this tech, although they dint bother trying to explain it with technobabble at all, because of the showrunners allergy to trek-speak. STD, and a single episode arc of tng a group of terrorists were using interdimensional transporters.

trek also had other forms of ftl, but those are very rare, and its pretty much similar to the last 2.

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[–] qantravon@startrek.website 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Basically, physics says that nothing, not even information can actually travel faster than the speed of light. It's a universal limit that shows up when you do the math on relativity. This concept is called "causality".

Because of this, FTL communication is probably impossible. Quantum entanglement seems like it could provide a loophole, but it doesn't actually work that way. To actually use quantum entanglement for communication, it actually needs a confirmation message, which would have to be delivered by a different means (every quantum message needs a non-quantum confirmation). That confirmation would be bound by the speed of light, thus preserving causality.

This is a very very rough description based on my memory, so some details may be a little off, but it should cover the gist. This article goes into more detail:

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/quantum-entanglement-faster-than-light/

Edit: After reading, the answer is more that attempting to impart information onto the entangled particles to send a message necessarily breaks the entanglement and thus does not transmit the information to the other side. Entangling the particles makes their states related to each other, but only at the time of entanglement, and anything that changes either particle (including measuring it) will break the entanglement going forward.

[–] Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Yup. You just summed up the start of the conversation I had with ChatGPT to figure out exactly what we were talking about Here and why the fact that even if we can’t directly send coherent information, if it appears that a change in particle A directly causes a change in particle B, and it appears that that causation happened Instantaneously, we can’t ever prove it or measure it or know it for certain, because the proving measuring and knowing would have to have occurred at instantaneously themselves in order to actually be proof at all. The even more fascinating part I wound up with is discovering the Holographic Principle, as discovered by Beckenstein and later expanded on and proven by Stephen Hawking, that says that all information in the 3-D world is actually encoded into a 2-D framework. That one blew my mind and I’m gonna be thinking about that for a while.

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[–] lemmie689@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] naught101@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago

This will be useful for all the people over at !leopardsatemyface@lemmy.world

[–] rauls5@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 week ago

Fully autonomous humanoid robots. Unfortunately with out-of-control AGI they will probably kill me.

It would have been cool to have a benign C3-PO or R2D2.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I would guess that we'll most-likely have AGI in 100 years. And that's pretty futuristic and impactful.

[–] Ledericas@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago

fusion maybe, but in scifi, it often requires an alien race making first contact, we wont even get to things like anti-matter tech without that intervention. SG1 is more in our time frame, but with aliens already possessing advanced tech

[–] MITM0@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (5 children)
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[–] Archangel1313@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago

Orbital habitats with rotational gravity.

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